Gang Life’s Grip Proves Hard to Escape

Before they were a gang, the Langdon boys were a football team.

One day a player from Blythe Street tackled a Langdon player too roughly. That started the trouble with Blythe. With Columbus Street, it was over football, or a girl. Nobody’s sure anymore. All they know is, pretty soon the Langdon boys had grudges against everybody else and everybody had a grudge against them.

They may not know exactly how all the trouble started, but everyone knows the instant when gangsterism, Langdon-style, became more than a thrilling contest to outwit the cops and taunt rivals by dumping tomatoes on their street.

That was the afternoon Casper died. He was the first to die by the gun, and it broke the neighborhood’s heart. It also broke Langdon’s luck. After that, as if a karmic levee had been breached, death gushed onto Orion Avenue.

There was Woody, stabbed by a drunk. Crazy killed himself, as he predicted, playing Russian roulette. Blanca was shot in the mouth by a San Fernando gang. Chato was gunned down on his way to church. There were Leon, Gordo, Downer, Joker. And finally, Pee Nut, a mischievous artist who climbed onto the roof of Langdon Avenue Elementary School one yule season and wrote, “Have a Pee Nutty Christmas.”

Almost all are buried at the San Fernando Mission Cemetery, not much more than a pistol shot from where the young men died in defense of streets they didn’t own, at the hands of enemies they didn’t know.

About 30 members of the gang gathered there one Sunday to celebrate Casper’s birthday. Coronas were popped and poured on the unmarked grave. Ashamed that, six years after his death, Casper lay in obscurity, they heatedly renewed pledges to raise $2,000 for a headstone.

Tupac Shakur’s anthem of gang life and death thumped softly in the background, like a spirit drum calling to the dead. “How many brothers fell victim to the streets?” Tupac asked.

The answer is 10, and counting.

From Boys to Men

If the Langdon neighborhood has a matriarch, someone who could tell the story of the gang, it might be Casper’s mother, Olivia Trejo. A wiry, 40-year-old construction worker with rough hands and sun-worn features, she watched Nathan--his real name--and his friends grow from marble-playing children into drug dealers and gangsters.

“I wasn’t there for neither one of my kids. I was in and out of prison so much,” she said in a flat, colorless voice that neither begged forgiveness nor tried to shrug off the blame.

She sat smoking at the kitchen table in the tiny, simply furnished apartment on Langdon Avenue that she shared with her sister, Gloria. While she talked, gang members walked in and out in their baggy uniforms. Livy, as they called her, watched the parade and admitted responsibility for the wreckage in her life.

What it came down to, first, last and always, was that she just liked getting high. Still did.

“I grew up in the hippie era. I was taking acid at 11.

“Not due to my parents,” she added quickly. “They provided everything for us.”

Her father always worked and her mother was there for her. But drugs didn’t mean the same thing then. At least, it did not seem that way to her. “I tell the boys, we used to kick back and smoke a joint,” she said.

She paused, blew a jet of smoke out the side of her thin-lipped mouth and drifted back, remembering how you could just go up to strangers and get a hit and not worry about what neighborhood they were from. You were all part of the same neighborhood, anyway, the one straights didn’t visit.

“We created a culture,” she said. “We believed in peace and love.”

Snapping back to the present, she spread her arms to embrace all the pathology of gangbanging and crack that had swallowed her candy-colored dream, a sour look creasing her face. “This is their culture,” she said, and they have never known anything else.

When Livy moved to the neighborhood nearly 20 years ago, there was no gang. It was a working-class and college student enclave. The neighborhood started going downhill while the boys were still small. The Langdon boys learned to cut up rock cocaine from the black drug dealers on the street. After a series of violent confrontations in the late 1980s, the Langdon boys drove off the blacks and took over.

The drug money opened up a world of luxury to the boys. They were too young to own cars so they filled their closets with Reeboks and adorned their girlfriends with gold.

Livy is proud that she never asked her son for money, as other parents did. Carlos, 16, tithes $20 a day to his parents to help with the bills and rent. “Everybody does sin,” he explained. “If I need to keep the family up, it’s not sin.”

Livy was between jail cells the day Casper died. It was especially ironic because there was a moment there that things might have turned out differently.

At her son’s urging, she was making plans to move out of the neighborhood. Casper, 15, a handsome boy with his mother’s fine features and too many girlfriends to count, was tiring of the gang life. He asked his mother to drive him to local colleges to watch the students rushing to class. “That’s gonna be me, mom,” Casper said.

On the afternoon of Nov. 3, 1990, Casper asked his mother for money to go to a party. He walked out on the street and a car pulled up. The occupants supposedly shouted, “Valerio Street!”

“This is Langdon!” replied Casper, walking over to the car. He fired first, some said, but his gun jammed. The intruders in the car shot him and two others. He was the only one to die.

Livy’s second son, Armando, is in jail for shooting his cousin, the son of Livy’s other sister, Martha. The shooting took place in a motel room where Martha Trejo was packing for Las Vegas to get her family away from L.A.’s gangs.

“The first time we moved to Langdon was ’78 or ‘79,” Livy recalled. “We haven’t been able to get out of Langdon yet.”

Some Langdon gangsters do manage to get out, she said, especially the older ones with mouths to feed. They get religion, find a straight job and try to settle down. But they have never done anything with their lives. The only work they can get is menial.

“They live on the line of poverty,” she said. “They may move out of the neighborhood, but they don’t get far.”

As much as Livy admitted her own failures, she earnestly wanted to believe something larger was at work. When she was young, there were gang members, but not so many, not like this. It maybe had to do with drugs and uninvolved parents, but there was a lot more besides that she couldn’t get into words.

“Something is wrong with us,” she said. “We’re not building something right.”

Skrappy’s Story

Skrappy, whose real name is John Aguilar, was the leader of the Langdon gang, a fact that took us weeks to discover. Because gang members like to think everyone is equal, leaders are careful not to act the part.

The gang cops had pegged another man as the leader. But it was Skrappy who called the Sunday meetings and ordered beatings for those who broke his rules. One day, his assistants beat 10 of their own in the middle of Orion Avenue, hospitalizing one, for showing up late to a meeting.

A stocky man with piercing eyes, Skrappy dressed simply, in a watch cap and sweatshirt, with a single gold chain around his neck. His analytical manner was well-suited to the small businessman he was--and the antithesis of the cliched, dressed-down gangster who calls everyone “homes.”

Leading a street gang wasn’t what Skrappy expected to be doing at age 25. After high school he attended Valley College, trying to leave the gangster life. He landed a $25-an-hour construction job on the Metro Rail project, had a townhouse, dental care for his wife, money in the bank. A regular life.

“I was going straight as an arrow,” he said one afternoon over lunch in a Mexican restaurant in the neighborhood.

He only went back to Orion one day several years ago to visit friends. It was just bad luck that an enemy drove up and shot him in the throat.

Instead of causing him to put the gangster life behind him, his brush with death propelled him back to the one world he knew: the four littered blocks that Langdon claims as its territory. He was arrested for drug sales, lost his green card and was deported to Mexico.

Now he was back running the neighborhood, one of only three veterans left from the old days when the gang began. “Fifteen of us started this,” he said, reeling off the names from memory.

There was a sad solemnity to the recitation, because most of the names belonged to people who were dead or in prison. “We’re like the last of the Mohicans,” Skrappy said of himself and the other two original members, Sal Saldana, 21, and Midget, 20.

Skrappy had a kind of calm self-assurance that would have made him stand out in any crowd, not just among gangsters. Just beneath the surface, however, was a brittle fatalism.

“You never stop being who you are,” he said. His own experience taught him that. Casper’s death taught him that. His girlfriend Carmen, killed in a drive-by, taught him that.

“I can’t focus because there’s too many problems in my head,” he said at one point.

This should have been a particularly good time to take the reins of the Langdon gang. The San Fernando Valley’s 3-year-old peace treaty among Latino gangs had been a boon to the gang’s drug business. They didn’t have to worry anymore about rivals shooting up their streets and driving off customers.

“They got it easy now,” laughed one gang member, just out of jail. “All they do is kick it and make money.”

Still, there were problems. Gang membership was soaring, but many of the new recruits were hotheads who didn’t see why they should make nice with old rivals like Blythe and Columbus.

Skrappy, a vocal supporter of the peace treaty, said the younger generation was hard to control.

“The knowledge we have we’re trying to hand down to the next generation,” he said. “But the younger ones are too outgoing. Things have changed. You give them your hand and they take your foot.”

He still had their respect, but it wasn’t like the old days, when everybody in the gang was close and the boys were known to all the neighbors. “They weren’t scared of us as much,” he said. “When I walked down the street, people would talk to me.”

Also, the gang’s bank account has been looted of several thousand dollars, according to three members.

The account was used to support the families of gang members who were dead or in jail. One of the principal beneficiaries was the mother of a dead gang member named Chato. Unhinged by her son’s death, she aimlessly walked the streets at night, pushing a grocery cart containing her 3-year-old daughter. The woman’s fanny pack always bulged with receipts to present to the gang for reimbursement.

Asked about the theft, Skrappy denied that any money was missing.

Not only was he the gang’s leader, but its best politician. Despite his hopelessness about the chances for a gang member to make it in the world, he said he was determined to take the gang in a direction no gang had gone before. The Langdon gang, in Skrappy’s dream, would not be just a criminal enterprise, but a demanding, nurturing, parental environment for its members. He said he made a rule requiring young gangsters to go to school, something unheard of in gang life.

“I try to tell little homies what’s positive and right,” he said.

It sounded like a line you hand a reporter or parole officer--which is just what it was.

When the third anniversary of the gang peace treaty rolled around, more than 25 Langdon streeters traveled by bus to City Hall for a formal ceremony thanking them for “doing the right thing for the community by promoting peace.” Every gang representative got a certificate of thanks.

The next night was Halloween. Langdon kicked off the fourth year of the peace treaty by shooting up the party of a rival gang that had marked up Langdon territory. Confronted over the shooting, Skrappy shrugged. Peacemaking only went so far.

“We don’t even write on our own neighborhood that much,” he said unapologetically. “We took it as disrespect.”

‘They Beat Me Like an Enemy’

While Skrappy bemoaned the loss of Langdon’s sense of family, Midget was downright angry about it.

“I’ve had it!” he yelled, standing in the middle of Orion Avenue, shouting his rage to the world at large. Potential customers drove by but Midget ignored them.

Midget had just gotten out of jail on some minor bust. His bail was just $100, yet his friends let him sit there a whole day before getting him out. Especially humiliating to Midget, gangsters from other gangs came and went on higher bails while Midget sat in his cell fuming.

“I used to love this neighborhood and it loved me back,” he said. “Now I love this neighborhood and it gives me the middle finger.”

Another one of the original members, Midget--Ricky Trejo--was a small, round-faced man with a deceptively calm exterior. In reality, he was a bundle of conflicting fears and wounds.

He said he was 11 when he first shot up a rival gang’s house. He also claimed to have shot and wounded a Valerio gang member, precipitating the killing of Casper, Midget’s cousin.

“I lost the most out of everybody,” he said one evening over dinner. His brother Anthony was the victim of the accidental shooting that sent Livy’s son, Armando, to jail for manslaughter.

We had taken Midget to a modest steakhouse in the Valley. When he sat down, wearing a pair of overalls, he spit out a mouthful of crack cocaine nuggets into his hand and pocketed the drugs.

Each day, he said, he tries to sell between $100 and $200 worth. “Sometimes it comes fast,” he said. “Sometimes it takes hours.”

He ate a plate of French fries with his fingers, disdaining the steak we offered, his eyes darting around the room. It was apparent that this self-confessed gunman was nervous to the point of fright at being out of his familiar surroundings.

He brought along a photo album chronicling the history of the gang. He began thumbing through pages depicting young men and women at parties, at the beach, in cramped apartments with half-empty beer bottles, all flashing the “L” sign for Langdon with their thumbs and index fingers.

“I look at them and get depressed because it’s not the same anymore,” Midget said. “I was the baby. They would always make sure I was fed. If it was cold, a homie would take off his jacket and put it on me.”

He had a ready-made list of grievances: His mother was having financial trouble in Las Vegas, but Skrappy didn’t send her any money; there was still no stone on Casper’s grave; they beat him, cutting open his head, for not attending a meeting.

“They beat me like I was an enemy,” Midget said.

There was a reason. Because Midget was in charge of the gang before Skrappy, some blamed him for the money missing from the gang’s bank account. “They wanted to kill him,” said one gangster.

Now, all Midget wanted was “to get out of here.”

He had once saved $18,000 to buy a house for his girlfriend and two kids, only to blow it on drugs. Things got so bad that he was forced to sleep on the floor of his aunt Livy’s apartment.

Now he was saving again. It would take several months of dealing to get the $4,000 together that he needed, but after that, Midget promised, he was gone.

Sal and Lorena

Sal Saldana, the third member of the triumvirate Skrappy referred to as the last of the Mohicans, was also thinking it was time to change his life.

Over the years, he had warmed up a lot of cell bunks and made so many enemies on the streets of Los Angeles that he had to drop his gang nickname, Bandit.

Sitting in jail one more time, on a carjacking charge that would later be dropped, he wrote to Lorena Perez and said he was ready to do his duty to her and Little Sal.

Lorena, a handsome woman of 21 with a cascade of dark hair, didn’t go all aflutter at the prospect of making a life with Sal. For one thing, he was a vicious drunk. He spent 18 months in jail for breaking Lorena’s front teeth. A basically good-hearted man when he wasn’t drinking, he had also never shown any signs of ambition.

Still, broke and with a 2-year-old to feed, Lorena did not have a lot of options.

With Sal away, the gang used her apartment in a building across the street from ours as a clubhouse. Lorena cooked for them and did their laundry. At any time of day, they could be found lounging on the sofa, watching television and running up her phone bill.

The police raided the place one night, cuffed her in front of Little Sal and warned her that she could lose custody if she didn’t straighten up.

Little Sal was the gang mascot. He had picked up the furrowed brow, narrow-eyed, mad-dog face that gang members flash at their enemies. “Bad boys,” he squeaked whenever he saw a police car. Then he ran, just like gang members do.

Lorena was not raised to this life. She had been a straight-A student. Midget nicknamed her the Karate Kid because as a girl she was so consumed with her martial arts lessons. When the Langdon guys gathered under her window and tried to get her attention, she ignored them.

She developed a wild streak after her parents divorced. Now, she was the first in her family to go on welfare.

Jobless and without a car, Lorena was as trapped in the gang life as Sal. She relied on the gang to pay the phone bills and buy diapers for Little Sal.

Feeling increasingly desperate, Lorena read Sal’s letters and began to hope that he could change. And as Sal’s release drew near, she kept it a secret from Skrappy and the others. She hoped to slip quietly away from the gang life before it got its hooks any deeper into Little Sal.

A few weeks later, it seemed Sal and Lorena had made a clean escape. Little Sal was riding a Big Wheel around the patio of the Sun Valley bungalow that Sal’s mother, Brenda Hinojos, had rented for them. The boy’s gang haircut was growing out and his father looked forward to teaching his son to play baseball.

He didn’t miss the guys, Sal said. He was too busy learning to be a family man. He was taking classes to get a job as a sanitation worker, and looking forward to the time when he could buy Lorena a house.

“Nothing too much,” Sal said modestly. “Just enough.”

His mother said Sal once made $600 a day dealing drugs. Yet he was proclaiming his intent to happily haul garbage.

This was part of the strange dissonance of gang life. The gangsters knew theirs was a Peter Pan existence, and they cherished the thrills and chills as long as they could. But they also knew that waiting out there somewhere was the grown-up world, which they would join some day.

Back to the Mission

They may leave, Livy had said, but they don’t get far.

Two days after Sal talked about making his break, the gang returned to the cemetery, this time for Chato’s birthday. Midget was missing, but again proving the strength of Orion’s riptide, Sal was back.

Skrappy put on a T-shirt that read, “In Loving Memory of Mr. Chato,” and gulped Cuervo Gold straight from the bottle.

Chato’s sister, Nina, spread a blanket and put an open bottle of Corona on the grave.

Near sunset, the Langdon gang piled into their cars and raced back to the neighborhood, as though they couldn’t bear to be caught outside their territory after dark.

We didn’t follow. We were moving out the next day, and this was the last time we would spend with all of them.

As we watched them go, we thought about Chato and Casper and the rest. They had chances to get out. But when it came down to it, they couldn’t abandon the streets they had fought on, drunk on, slept on, earned their livings on, and died on.

Would anyone remember? Midget had filled a binder with pictures of everyone. But to the new homies, Casper was just a name. Not even that. He was a small concrete marker with a number on it, pounded into the grass.

Next: Saving Orion

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Living on Orion Avenue

Staff writer John Johnson and Times photographer Carolyn Cole lived for three months in an apartment at 8960 Orion Ave. in North Hills--a street in the San Fernando Valley where the local gang openly sold crack cocaine, intimidated residents and assaulted outsiders. The objective was to learn how people survive--and sometimes thrive--in one of the city’s poorest and toughest neighborhoods. Before they left Orion last fall, The Times’ team also found a strong sense of community, created by families struggling to achieve the American dream.

* Sunday: Orion Avenue, where borders of crime, culture and necessity define a separate existence.

* Monday: For many, life on Orion Avenue means existence behind iron bars.

* Today: Even for some gang members, getting out is hard to do.

* Wednesday: The problems on Orion Avenue are obvious, but the solutions elusive.

This series will be available in full on The Times’ Web site beginning Wednesday at https://www.latimes.com/orion